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Smart and Resilient Cities Tools for City Leadership
SMART & RESILIENT CITIES
TOOLS FOR CITY LEADERSHIP
BY AMY HOCHADEL
The intersection between “smart” and “resilient” cities is coming into sharp focus. City managers must use resources more intelligently to cope with dramatic shifts in demand and mitigation planning for the future.
What is a smart city? What is a resilient city? Are they the same thing? Can you be smart and resilient? Can you be smart and not resilient or one or the other? Smart and resilient are two issue areas that must be addressed hand in hand if we hope to have economically successful and healthy cities moving forward.
So, how do we think about cities if we’re going to make them smarter and more resilient? We don’t think about individual verticals of transport, energy, water, etc. We think about cities as layers, where everything is dependent on the other layer: Your transportation strategy is dependent on your energy strategy, which is dependent on your urban policy strategy. It’s all interrelated. And it’s not until we get to the surface of this layered model that we can think about what that means for the built environment. And then, lastly, we think about what types of technologies we need to enable that smart city.
Cities are already some of the most resilient entities throughout history. They existed long before national boundaries. They grow, shrink, adapt, change, and reinvent themselves all the time. As environments, politics, and economic situations changed, cities learned to reinvent themselves. But today, we have an added gift: advancements in technology and innovation that we can use to help us think through that reinvention.
Smart resilience is the premise of a datadriven response, at a systemic city level, to guide and maintain city readiness and capacity during times of shock. This means integration and guiding and maintaining city readiness. We don’t know what will happen next, but we can put things in place that can help us sustain these shocks. So, what do practitioners need for smart, resilient cities?
Find (and use) information more
effectively. We need to understand how to find the right data—and how to map, categorize, and organize that data relevant to a resilient agenda. This ensures practitioners are aware of, have access to, and effectively use the information that is already there to inform a coherent, holistic, and efficient data strategy that facilitates a resilient agency.
Integrate city subsystems and
stakeholders. We need to help practitioners demonstrate the interrelationships between different elements of the city system and the impacts one part of a system has on another. This will allow them to identify opportunities to put single assets to multiple uses across different silos to mitigate shock, rather than having to invest heavily in new capacity.
Drive urgency for action in the present.
City leaders want to see results. They want to show early wins and long-term gains. This helps practitioners demonstrate how mitigation plans or projects for the future incorporate benefits for the present and help practitioners make a case for investment. Global networks of cities like C40 are amazing ways to learn how to plan for the long term while getting examples from other cities, sharing learnings, and having really good short-term wins at the same time.
Amy Hochadel
Director, Connected Placed Catapult
London, England
Dr. Amy Hochadel is an expert in global cities and is currently the Director of Global Business at Connected Places Catapult in London. She works with local leaders, entrepreneurs, and city and national governments worldwide. Author of Local Leadership in a Global Era: Policy and Behaviour Change in Cities, Hochadel specializes in enabling local governments to build global innovation economies and future resilience.
